Posts

If I were to ask you what you spend your money on each month, in detail, you might think me rude for asking such a personal question. But I bet you’d be able to answer me, if you wanted to, with fairly exact information about what your rent or mortgage costs, how much you pay for your car or your education or your Netflix subscription, how much you put aside for your next holiday or your retirement.

This is a deceptively simple exercise that has surprising power to shift your mindset. It’s a quick way to get an overview of what’s important for you in your life, and thus is great to do in January when you’re anyway focused on your priorities for the upcoming year (aren’t you?).

This post is more of a journal entry that I’m sharing on Artist of Life. I now have the habit of writing myself this kind of ‘process post’ at regular intervals in the development of major projects. Partly these updates serve to check in with my original intention and to keep me on track.

This post is about ‘going dark’ and why it’s been an important part of my self-development process. A quick usage check in the Urban Dictionary reveals varied interpretations for this term, so let me be clear: I’m using ‘going dark’ to describe those periods of time where I withdraw from view by not posting on social media and/or reducing my real world interactions to the max.

The artist date is a wonderful exercise with a number of significant benefits. It enables you to practice making a commitment to yourself, and it demands that you create space and time for yourself. It also requires you to find a way to have more fun in your life. Each of these benefits will help you in multiple ways on the self-development path.